If you are passionate about football, do you play football? or atleast watch others play football? That's definitely not your work. Why do you do it then?
I have some sympathy with them; recruiting is hard, vital to get "right", and susceptible to gaming by unscrupulous individuals. It's also hard to get rid of people once they're in (at least in the UK). However, this is WHY you have to spend a lot of time on it. There are no shortcuts. Adding another checkbox "Has GitHub account with code in it" to the process is futile. You know, it won't surprise me to see "faked" accounts with lots of (scripted) commits showing up. Easy to do. Or better, I'll sell you a convincing looking repository with some code and a cheat-sheet of what to say when asked about it at interview. Hey, cool new startup idea!
When I've interviewed people in the past, I've had them do some coding or domain modelling / OO design exercise as a phone screen. On the other side, companies I've interviewed with have used coding exercises (live or on paper).
I don't agree with the "if you're truly passionate" argument; challenge me in an interview and you'll find out how passionate I can be :) That doesn't extend to wasting my time with the latest recruiter fad. If I want your job, and if you want to see code, ask me to write you something. Pick a language, I'm not choosy; I'll tell you if it's one I know or if I'll need some extra time to learn it, and if I'm not interested in a job using $SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE_OF_THE_WEEK$ we can stop there.